Hey there.
A woman in my community said something a few weeks ago that I still can't shake:
"Corporate is a prison, and the paycheck is the lock."
I keep hearing versions of it: a woman who carries the health insurance for her whole family. A woman whose family of five can't run on one salary. They want out. They've done the math a hundred times, and the math keeps giving them the same answer: stay.
So they stay.
And here's the part almost nobody says out loud: most of them have already tried.
Maybe you have too. There's a business idea sitting in your Notes app. An LLC you half-googled one Sunday afternoon. A side project that got three good weekends before a work deadline ate the fourth, and then it just quietly died. But every time you sat down to actually work on it, those voices showed up:
What if my colleagues find out?
What if I'm not good at selling myself?
What if I don't have anything people would actually pay for?
Where would I even find the time?
What if I lose the salary my family depends on?
I think a lot of us get this wrong. Those five questions are simply what starting a business sounds like from the inside. Everyone hears them. (I heard every one, and I'd spent ten years as a litigator. Arguing for a living was literally my job. The voices showed up anyway.)
So let me push back on the "prison sentence."
You can start building right now, while you're still employed.
Most of us carry the opposite belief around without ever looking at it directly: that building a business means leaping, and leaping means losing the salary, so the whole thing stays parked until some safe, mythical day arrives. I'll save you the wait. That day is not coming, and it does not have to.
Here's what I want you to see: the paycheck you feel tied to is the very thing that can fund your way out. Every month you're employed is a month you build with zero income pressure. You get clear on what you'd actually sell. You set up the boring infrastructure nobody warns you about. You quietly prime your network. You write the launch email and let it sit in your drawer until the day you choose to send it. (Or the day a fifteen-minute HR call chooses for you. It happens.)
I built my income in the middle of the fire, after I'd run out of choices. COVID took The Riveter down in a matter of weeks, and I was already deep into a legal fight that's now stretched seven years, with four daughters watching me figure it out in real time. I had no runway. You do. You can start now, quietly, while the salary still lands.
There's an order to doing this, and it's a lot simpler than the noise in your head is telling you. I'll walk you through the whole thing in my next email.
If you already know you want in, our newly-named "Lean Out!" cohort starts in a few weeks. It's a three week program to help you:
- Work for yourself
- Find fractional roles
- Set your own hours
- Work with people you choose
- Do work you love (w/o corporate BS)
If you're ready to start building on your own terms, we'd love to have you on board:
And if you'd rather talk it through first, book a free call with my team member Michelle, an impressive entrepreneur who forged her own path over the past few years. She'll listen to your story and help you figure out where to start.
Amy
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